All the Details Seen and Heard. By Sabri Sky

Menu

Gun Control Alt Delete

The U.S. average is one shooting a day. A nation-state where the military can have these weapons but the people can’t, and government en masse decrees via violence–yes, corporate government’s violence–some people as mentally ill in an inaccurate and stigmatizing way primarily for-profit scares me just as much as the possibility of “unstable lone wolves” fatally hating in violent action with weapons. I don’t know the answer, but an essential form of martial law is not it, though the NRA needs to put its mansplaining, KKK-seeded shriveled moneyed dick back in its rapey shorts, and could use some talk therapy.

To the argument that citizens should not be allowed military-grade weapons, we need to back up. The concept of “military-grade weapons” in the first place scares me; it’s a big part of the problem. Sure, maybe it’s kind of too late to go back on that, because the weapons are so powerful. But I wonder if societies thought that at every new level of advancement and technology of weapons. And there is empirical evidence of stricter gun laws corrollating to fewer deaths by guns. But, those governments, of Canada, Scandinavian countries, European countries, may be not as corrupt and imperialist, or imperialistically capable and practicing, as the U.S.’s. Plus, *more* people still own guns in Canada, and all citizens serve in the military in some of the Scandinavian countries. How do these factor in comparitively and for the global whole of armed citizens?

A corrupt, racist, classist, and corporate government produced and perpetuates the labeling, stigma, and division by naming some people “mentally ill” just as it criminalizes people often by group (the poor, groups of people of color, by zip code, by religious belief, by citizen/immigrant status, and also accomplishes this via methods [besides classification] of geography and affiliations), forcing other dehumanizing and demonizing permanent labels on them such as “felons,” or “convicts.” Both of these are purposely socially synonymous with violence. It’s also, purposely, an unpredictable, morphous violence–very similar to the conceptual wars on drugs and terror. The only constant is the simultaneous pressurizing of these primarily arbitrarily and discriminitorily delineated people by also disallowing most employment and opportunistic education and other social participatory and productive opportunity. The perpetuation is the ripple effect of Othering by the people, including those who also may be stigmatized in another of the ways or even the same. The people do the bulk of this divide-and-conquer and -profit work. So because of how that is done, I do not think it solves the problem to simply bar weapons from people branded with these stigmatizations.